The British Battle Fleet, Volume 1 (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Its Inception and Growth Throughout the Centuries to the Present Day

By Fred T. Jane

A classic in its genre, Fred T. Jane’s history of the British battle fleet focuses on how naval ships came to be—their development from crude warships of the past to intricate and complex machines in the early 1900s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: May 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411456068

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THE BRITISH BATTLE FLEET

Its Inception and Growth Throughout the Centuries to the Present Day

VOLUME 1

FRED T. JANE

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-5606-8

PREFACE

THIS book is not intended to be a history of the British Navy in the generally accepted sense of the term. For this reason small space is devoted to various strategical and tactical matters of the past which generally bulk largely in more regular naval histories—of which a sufficiency already exist.

In such histories primary interest naturally attaches to what the admirals did with the ships provided for them. Here I have sought rather to deal with how the ships came to be provided, and how they were developed from the crude warships of the past to the intricate and complicated machines of today; and the strictly history part of the book is compressed with that idea principally in view. The live end of naval construction is necessarily that which directly or indirectly concerns the ships of our own time. The warships of the past are of special interest in so far as they were steps to the warships of today; but, outside that, practical interest seems confined to what led to these steps being what they were.

Thus regarded, Trafalgar becomes of somewhat secondary interest as regards the tremendous strategical questions involved, but of profound importance by reason of the side-issue that the Victory's forward bulkhead was so slightly built that she sustained an immense number of casualties which would never have occurred had she been designed for the particular purpose that Nelson used her for at Trafalgar. The tactics of Trafalgar have merely a literary and sentimental interest now, and even the strategies which led to the battle are probably of little utility to the strategists of our own times. But the Victory's thin forward bulkhead profoundly affected, and to some extent still affects, modern British naval construction. Trafalgar, of course, sanctified for many a year end-on approach, and so eventually concentrated special attention on bulkheads. But previous to Trafalgar, the return of the Victory after it for refit, and Seppings' inspection of her, the subject of end-on protection had been ignored. The cogitations of Seppings helped to make what would have very much influenced history had any similar battle occurred in the years that followed his constructional innovations.

Again, at an earlier period much naval history turned upon the ventilation of bilges. Improvements in this respect (devised by men never heard of today) enabled British ships to keep the seas without their crews being totally disabled by diseases which often overmastered their foes. The skill of the admirals, the courage of the crews, both form more exciting reading. Yet there is every indication to prove that this commonplace matter of bilges was the secret of victory more than once!

Coming back to more recent times, the loss of the Vanguard, which cost no lives, involved greater subsequent constructional problems than did the infinitely more terrible loss of the Captain a few years before. Who shall say on how many seeming constructional failures of the past, successes of the yet unborn future may not rest?

A number of other things might be cited, but these suffice to indicate the particular perspective of this book, and to show why, if regarded as an orthodox history of the British Navy, it is occasionally in seemingly distorted perspective.

To say that in the scheme of this book the ship-builder is put in the limelight instead of the ship-user, would in no way be precisely correct, though as a vague generalisation it may serve well enough. In exact fact each, of course, is and ever has been dependent on the other. Nelson himself was curtailed by the limitations of the tools provided for him. Had he had the same problems one or two hundred years before he would have been still more limited. Had he had them fifty or a hundred years later—who shall say?

With Seppings' improvements, Trafalgar would have been a well-nigh bloodless victory for the British Fleet. It took Trafalgar, however, to inspire and teach Seppings. Of every great sea-fight something of the same kind may be said. The lead had to be given.

Yet those who best laboured to remove the worst disabilities of the means of Blake, contributed in that measure to Nelson's successes years and years later on. Their efforts may surely be deemed worthy of record, for all that between the unknown designer of the Great Harry in the sixteenth century and the designers of Super-Dreadnoughts of today there may have been lapses and defects in details. There was never a lapse on account of which the user was unable to defeat any hostile user with whom he came into conflict. The means provided served. The creators of warships consistently improved their creations: but they were not improved without care and thought on the part of those who produced them.

To those who provided the means and to the rank and file it fell that many an admiral was able to do what he did. These admirals made history. But ever there were those others who made that history making possible, and who so made it also.

In dealing with the warships of other eras, I have been fortunate in securing the cooperation of Mr. W. L. Wyllie, R.A., who has translated into vivid pictorial obviousness a number of details which old prints of an architectural nature entirely fail to convey. With a view to uniformity, this scheme, though reinforced by diagrams and photographs, has been carried right into our own times.

Some things which I might have written I have on that account left unrecorded. There are some things that cold print and the English language cannot describe. These things must be sought for in Mr. Wyllie's pictures.

In conclusion, I would leave the dedication page to explain the rest of what I have striven for in this book.

F. T. J.

PREFACE TO NEW EDITION

THIS book was originally written three years ago. Since it was first published the greatest war ever known has broken out. To meet that circumstance this particular edition has been revised and brought to date in order to present to the reader the exact state of our Navy when the fighting began.

Modern naval warfare differs much from the warfare of the past; at any rate from the warfare of the Nelson era. But if men and matériel have altered, the general principles of naval war have remained unchanged. Indeed, there is some reason to believe that the wheel of fortune has brought us back to some similitude of those early days when to kill the enemy was the sole idea that obtained, when there were no rules of civilised war, when it was simply kill and go on killing.

To these principles Germany has reverted. The early history of the British Navy indicates that we were able to render a good account of ourselves under such conditions. For that matter we made our Navy under such training. It is hard to imagine that by adopting old time methods the Germans will take from us the Sea Empire which we thus earned in the past.

18th June 1915.

F. T. J.

CONTENTS

I. THE BIRTH OF BRITISH NAVAL POWER

II. THE NORMAN AND PLANTAGENET ERAS

III. THE TUDOR PERIOD AND BIRTH OF A REGULAR NAVY

IV. THE PERIOD OF THE DUTCH WARS

V. THE EARLY FRENCH WARS

VI. THE GREAT FRENCH WAR

VII. FROM THE PEACE OF AMIENS TO THE FINAL FALL OF NAPOLEON

VIII. GENERAL MATTERS IN THE PERIOD OF THE FRENCH WARS

IX. THE BIRTH OF MODERN WARSHIP IDEAS

X. THE COMING OF THE IRONCLAD

XI. THE REED ERA

PLANS, DIAGRAMS, ETC.

PHINEAS PETT'S ROYAL SOVEREIGN

POSITIONS OF THE FLEETS AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR

EARLY BROADSIDE IRONCLADS

REED ERA BROADSIDE SHIPS

REED ERA TURRET SHIPS

RAMS OF THE REED ERA

BREASTWORK MONITORS

I

THE BIRTH OF BRITISH NAVAL POWER

THE birth of British naval power is involved in considerable obscurity and a good deal of legend. The Phœnicians and the Romans have both been credited with introducing nautical ideas to these islands, but of the Phœnicians there is nothing but legend so far as any British Navy is concerned. That the Phœnicians voyaged here we know well enough, and a British fleet of the B.C. era may have existed, a fleet due to possible Phœnicians who, having visited these shores, remained in the land. Equally well it may be mythical.

Whatever share the ancient Britons may have had in the supposed commercial relations with Gaul, it is clear that no fleet as we understand a fleet existed in the days of Julius Cæsar. Later, while England was a Roman province, Roman fleets occasionally fought upon British waters against pirates and in connection with Roman revolutions, but they were ships of the ruling power.

Roman power passed away. Saxons invaded and remained; but having landed they became people of the land—not of the sea. Danes and other seafarers pilaged English shores much as they listed till Alfred the Great came to the throne.

Alfred has been called the Father and Founder of the British Fleet. It is customary and dramatic to suppose that Alfred was seized with the whole modern theory of Sea Power as a sudden inspiration—that he recognised that invaders could only be kept off by defeating them on the sea.

This is infinitely more pretty than accurate. To begin with, even at the beginning of the present Twentieth Century it was officially put on record that "while the British fleet could prevent invasion, it could not guarantee immunity from small raids on our great length of coast line. In Alfred's day, one mile was more than what twenty are now; messages took as many days to deliver as they now do minutes, and the raid was the only kind of over-sea war to be waged. It is altogether chimerical to imagine that Alfred thought things out" on the lines of a modern naval theorist.

In actual fact,¹ what happened was that Alfred engaged in a naval fight in the year 875, somewhere on the South Coast. There is little or no evidence to show where, though near Wareham is the most likely locality.

In 877 something perhaps happened to the Danes at Swanage, but the account in Asser is an interpolated one, and even so suggests shipwreck rather than a battle.

In 882 (possibly 881) two Danish ships sank: the rest (number not recorded) surrendered later on.

In 884 occurred the battle of the Stour. Here the Saxon fleet secured a preliminary success, in which thirteen Danish ships were captured. This may or may not have been part of an ambush—at any rate the final result was the annihilation of King Alfred's fleet.

In 896 occurred the alleged naval reform so often alluded to as the birth of the British Navy—those ships supposed to have been designed by Alfred, which according to Asser² were full nigh twice as long as the others. . . . shapen neither like Frisian nor the Danish, but so as it seemed to him that they would be most efficient.

Around these early Dreadnoughts much has been weaved, but there is no evidence acceptable to the best modern historians that Alfred really built any such ships—they tend to reject the entire theory.

The actual facts of that naval battle of the Solent in 897 from which the history of our navy is popularly alleged to date, appear to be as follows:

There were nine of King Alfred's ships, manned by Frisian pirates, who were practically Danes. These nine encountered three Danish vessels in a land-locked harbour—probably Brading—and all of them ran aground, the Danish ships being in the middle between two Saxon divisions. A land fight ensued, till, the tide rising, the Danish ships, which were of lighter draught than the Saxon vessels, floated. The Danes then sailed away, but in doing so two of them were wrecked.

All the rest of the story seems to be purely legendary. Our real island story—as events during the next few hundred years following Alfred clearly indicate—is not that of a people born to the sea; but the story of a people forced thereto by circumstances and the need of self-preservation.

It is a very unromantic beginning. There is a strange analogy between it and the beginning in later days of the Sea Power of the other Island Empire—Japan. Japan today seeks—as we for centuries have sought—for an historical sequence of the sea spirit and all such things as an ideal islander should possess. Neither we nor they have ever understood or ever properly realised that it was the Continentals who long ago first saw that it was necessary to command the sea to attack the islanders. The more obvious contrary has always been assumed. It has never been held, or even suggested, that the Little Englander protesting against bloated naval armaments, so far from being a modern anachronism, an ultra-Radical or Socialist exotic, may really claim to be the true exponent of the spirit of the Islanders for all time. That is one reason why (excluding the mythical Minos of Crete) only two island-groups have ever loomed big in the world's history.

When Wilhelm II of Germany said: "Unsere Zukunft liegt auf dem Wasser," he uttered a far more profound truth than has ever been fully realised. Fleets came into being to attack Islanders with.

The Islanders saw the sea primarily as a protection existing between them and the enemy. To the Continental the sea was a road to, or obstacle between him and the enemy, only if the enemy filled it with ships. The Islanders have ever tended to trust to the existence of the sea itself as a defence, except in so far as they have been taught otherwise by individuals who realised the value of shipping. Those millions of British citizens who today are more or less torpid on the subject of naval defence are every whit as normal as those Germans who, in season and out, preach naval expansion.

The explanation of all this is probably to be found in the fact that the earliest warfare known either to Continentals or to Islanders was military warfare. The ship as at first employed was used entirely as a means of transport for reaching the enemy—first, presumably, against outlying islands near the coast, later for more over-sea expeditions.

Ideas of attack are earlier than ideas of defence, and the primary idea of defence went no further than the passive defensive. King Alfred, merely in realising the offensive defensive, did a far greater thing than any of the legendary exploits associated with his history. The idea was submerged many a time in the years that followed, but from time to time it appeared and found its ultimate fruition in the Royal Navy.

Yet still, the wonder is not that only two Island Empires have ever come into existence, but that any should have come into existence at all. The real history of King Alfred's times is that the Continental Danes did much as they listed against the insular Saxons of England, till the need was demonstrated for an endeavour to meet the enemy on his own element.

In the subsequent reigns of Athelstan and Edmund, some naval expeditions took place. Under Edgar, the fleet reached its largest. Although the reputed number of 3,600 vessels is, of course, an exaggerated one, there was enough naval power at that time to secure peace.

This navy had, however, a very transient existence, because in the reign of Ethelred, who succeeded to the throne, it had practically ceased to exist, and an attempt was made to revive it. This attempt was so little successful that Danish ships had to be hired for naval purposes.

A charter of the time of Ethelred II exists which is considered by many to be the origin of that Ship Money which, hundreds of years later, was to cause so much trouble to England. Under this, the maintenance of the Navy was made a State charge on landowners, the whole of whom were assessed at the rate of producing one galley for every three hundred and ten hides of land that they possessed.

This view is disputed by some historians, who maintain that the charter is possibly a forgery, and that it is not very clear in any case. However, it does not appear to have produced any useful naval power.

That naval power was insufficient is abundantly clear from the ever increasing number of Danish settlements. In the St. Bride's Day massacre, which was an attempt to kill off the leading Danes amongst the recent arrivals, further trouble arose; and in the year 1013, Swain, King of Denmark, made a large invasion of England, and in the year 1017, his son Canute ascended to the throne.

Under Canute, the need of a navy to protect the coast against Danish raids passed away. The bulk of the Danish ships were sent back to Denmark, forty vessels only being retained.

Once or twice during the reign of Canute successful naval expeditions were undertaken, but at the time of the King's death the regular fleet consisted of only sixteen ships. Five years later, an establishment was fixed at thirty-two, and remained more or less at about that figure, till, in the reign of Edward the Confessor trouble was caused by Earl Godwin, who had created a species of fleet of his own. With a view to suppressing these a number of King's ships were fitted out; but as the King and Godwin came to terms the fleet was not made use of.

Close following upon this came the Norman invasion, which of all the foolhardy enterprises ever embarked on by man was theoretically one of the most foolish. William's intentions were perfectly well known. A certain English fleet existed, and there was nothing to prevent its expansion into a force easily able to annihilate the heterogeneous Norman flotilla.

How many ships and men William actually got together is a matter upon which the old chroniclers vary considerably. But he is supposed to have had with him some 696 ships³; and since his largest ships were not over twenty tons and most of them a great deal smaller, it is clear that they must have been crowded to excess and in poor condition to give battle against anything of the nature of a determined attack from an organised fleet.

No English fleet put in appearance, however. Harold had collected a large fleet at Sandwich, but after a while, for some unknown reason, it was dispersed, probably owing to the lateness of the season. The strength of the fleet collected, or why it was dispersed, are, however, immaterial issues; the fact of importance is that the fleet was inadequate because it failed to prevent the invasion. A neglected fleet entailed the destruction of the Saxon dominion.

II

THE NORMAN AND PLANTAGENET ERAS

WILLIAM the Conqueror's first act on landing was to burn all his ships—a proceeding useful enough in the way of preventing any of his followers retiring with their spoils, but inconvenient to him shortly after he became King of England. Fleets from Denmark and Norway raided the coasts, and, though the raiders were easily defeated on shore, the pressure from them was sufficient to cause William to set about recreating a navy, of which he made some use in the year 1071. In 1078 the Cinque Ports were established, five ports being granted certain rights in return for policing the Channel and supplying ships to the King as required. But the amount of naval power maintained was very small, both in the reign of William the First and his successors.

Not until the reign of Henry II was any appreciable attention paid to nautical matters. Larger ships than heretofore were built, as we assume from records of the loss of one alleged to carry 300 men. It was Henry II who first claimed the Sovereignty of the British Seas and enacted the Assize of Arms whereby no ship or timber for shipbuilding might be sold out of England.

When Richard I came to the throne in 1189, fired with ambition to proceed to the Crusades, he ordered all ports in his dominions to supply him with ships in proportion to their population. The majority of these ships came, however, from Acquitaine. The fleet thus collected is said to have consisted of nine large ships, 150 small vessels, thirty galleys, and a number of transports. The large ships, which have also been given as thirteen in number, were known at the time as busses. They appear to have been three-masters. The fleet sailed in eight divisions. This expedition to the Holy Land was the first important over-sea voyage ever participated in by English ships, the greatest distance heretofore traversed having been to Norway in the time of Canute. This making of a voyage into the unknown was, however, not quite so difficult as it might at first sight be supposed to be, because there is no doubt whatever that the compass was by then well-known and used. Records from 1150 and onwards exist which describe the compass of that period. A contemporary chronicler⁴ wrote of it:—

"This [polar] star does not move. They [the seamen] have an art which cannot deceive, by virtue of the manite, an ill brownish stone to which iron spontaneously adheres. They search for the right point, and when they have touched a needle on it, and fixed it to a bit of straw, they lay it on water, and the straw keeps it afloat. Then the point infallibly turns towards the star; and when the night is dark and gloomy, and neither star nor moon is visible, they set a light beside the needle, and they can be assured that the star is opposite to the point, and thereby the mariner is directed in his course. This is an art which cannot deceive."

The compass would seem to have existed, so far as northern nations were concerned, about the time of William the Conqueror. Not till early in the Fourteenth Century did it assume the form in which we now know it, but its actual antiquity is considerably more.

In connection with this expedition to the Holy Land, Richard issued a Code of Naval Discipline, which has been described as the germ of our Articles of War. Under this Code if a man killed another on board ship, he was to be tied to the corpse and thrown into the sea. If the murder took place on shore, he was to be buried alive with the corpse. The penalty for drawing a knife on another man, or drawing blood from him in any manner was the loss of a hand. For striking another, the offender was plunged three times into the sea. For reviling or insulting another man, compensation of an ounce of silver to the aggrieved one was